Welcome Back to Gotham City

Wednesday, November 30, 2011

We are all Herman Cain's Wife.

or Why Herman Cain Ought to be Cock-Punched From Coast to Coast With Spiked Brass Knuckles From Now Until the Iowa Caucus.

(In which Jurassicpork taketh a semen-spattered page from the Rude Pundit and regurgitateth with much vile and scatalogical spleenitude.)

Rachel Maddow had it figured out weeks ago when she finally discovered that Herman's Cain's candidacy is really nothing more than performance art.

And just yesterday, Charles Pierce, from his elegantly nasty nest at Esquire (think of James Wolcott on a really cranky day), in his usually eloquent way, not so gently exhorted Cain to take his leave from the race like the buffoonish wedding crasher that he is.

Seriously, now, folks, and this especially goes out to you post-literate dingleberries still stubbornly clinging to the rotting rectum of Ronald Reagan while desperately trying to convince yourselves and your fellow dead-enders that the Great Communicator was reincarnated through a former pizza mogul whose greatest claim to fame was in hurtling his peoples' image back to the days of Mandingo:

It's time to finally own up to this hideously elongated joke known as the Cain Train and admit it has long since passed and that now it's up to those of us in the reality-based community to add the final exclamation point to this seemingly neverending punchline.

This man had made more passes than Tom Brady with no running game. His mind went blank when asked about Libya. His mind went blank again when Chris Wallace asked him about right of return. Both times, Cain had that elephant in the headlights look and yet his supporters still threw millions at his feet.

His campaign spots make less sense than Fellini if he made films on purple microdot. He thinks Pokemon is a poet, got his 9-9-9 tax plan from Sim City and, for all we know, his national security strategy was based on Doom. His defiantly and proudly ignorant thoughts on other countries such as Uz-beki-beki-beki-beki-stan-stan make Rick Perry look like a foreign policy wonk.

He contradicted himself on abortion and women's rights faster than Mitt Romney on black beauties and has otherwise shown himself to be so stupendously unqualified for any public office let alone the presidency that millions of liberals are getting the dry heaves at the thought of another George W. Bush.

So here's my idea: We have SEAL Team Six abduct Herman Cain, put him in four point King Kong shackles like some right wing version of the Vitruvian Man, tour him like some village roadshow from coast to coast where anyone with a couple of bucks and a proper sense of outrage at this obscene mockery of the electoral process can then cock-punch Herman Cain from now until the caucuses.

We can sell it on PPV for $49.95 and, combined with the CPR (Cock-Punching Revenue) generate some income for schools, hospitals, unemployment benefits and infrastructure rebuilding, which immediately is a better and more humane plan for addressing these issues than anything Herman Cain and the rest of the GOP has come up with.

Seriously. Let's all punch Herman Cain so hard in his nether regions that his scrotum pops in like an inverted nipple. Because it's a masterfully sinister feat of dexterity when you can make people like Donald Trump and Sarah Palin sound like voices of reason for the Republican Party, as well as taking the heat off the other GOP psychopaths such as Rick Santorum, Newt Gingrich, Mitt Romney and Michele Bachmann.

We are all Herman Cain's wife. No doubt, there are many of us who wonder aloud or to ourselves what is keeping that woman silently and invisibly Velcro'd to her husband's hip considering all the allegations from at least six women. How loathsome do you have to be in your long-standing moral turpitude when a New Hampshire newspaper and several other conservative media outlets pass you by to go for another serial adulterer like Newt Gingrich?

The General Excommunicated?

I'd like to know why Patriot Boy (aka Jesus' General) was banned from your website. The General, who is an 11 on a manly scale of absolute gender, has been nothing but a throbbing pillar of support for Pastor Steven Anderson and during the most trying times of both their lives. I'm speaking, of course, of the time the Border police beat the shit out of him when he stood up for his somewhat vague rights and then when he openly wished for the President to die and then when he sent a man named Chris Broughton to an Obama gun rally with an AR 15 (Oh sorry. It wasn't a gun rally. It was a Town Hall on health care reform. My bad).

The point I'm making is that I think you have banned him for the wrong reasons. Just because he oils up like a Spartan of old and wrestles other manly men and his fist occasionally (and purely by accident, of course) winds up in the tight rectum of another hard-bodied, glistening male it does not make him a homosexual.

Therefore. I must issue an ultimatum: Either you reinstate the General immediately or I will be forced to abandon Mr. Anderson's glorified cult, as good as the butter cookies are (the ones made by his wife whose vagina doubles as a clown car). And in that case I will join Michael Parks' somewhat more even-keeled religion as that seen in the Kevin Smith movie, Red State.

Tuesday, November 29, 2011

Nyuk Nyuk of the Day

Further proof that Rick Perry has got to be without equivocation and without a shadow of a doubt the stupidest carbon-based life form in the entire solar system. Because in Rick Perry's Bizarro dimension:

1) The legal voting age is still 21.2) We live in a part time country.3) Election Day 2012 is actually six days later than we've been told.4) With good hair comes no accountability.

Monday, November 28, 2011

Let's All be Frank

It almost seems like a betrayal that, in a festering cesspool of corruption and stupidity, a man like Barney Frank would lay down his arms and walk off the field of battle. When political correctness was draped over the Beltway during the Reagan era like a wet Christo, Frank either didn't get the memo or balled it up and threw it in the circular file. However abrasive he was toward his detractors, whether it be a student full of himself, right wing pundits or misinformed Tea Bagger constituents, it can't be said that Congressman Frank suffered fools gladly.

Frank, the ranking Democrat and former chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, announced yesterday that he would not be seeking reelection. His reason was that his CD had been redrawn. Frank found himself in the ironic and absurd position of fighting a wave of anti-incumbency from new constituents who've never been represented by Frank. What was once arguably the safest seat in Congress, MA-4, is now conceivably vulnerable to a Republican challenger in an ominous environment of gerrymandering that almost always seems to favor Republicans (Frank lost the entire town of New Bedford, losing in the process many reliably Democratic-voting Luso-Americans and the bedrock of his support on the South Shore).

And, most inescapably, he's 71 and understandably wants to put up his feet in his golden years.

So let me add to the growing pile of premature political elegies by saying that the beginning of Frank's farewell is almost like eulogizing intelligence itself. As any real liberal knows, it is the moral and intellectual imperative of every one of us to lampoon and pillory stupidity, ignorance and bigotry whereever we find it. It's a long established if unwritten code on the Beltway and beyond and the 16 termer took full license of that invisible rule and then some.

The Frank anecdotes are as plentiful as those of the late Molly Ivins. After being called "Barney Fag" during a Dick Armey interview, which Armey then tried to worm out of by stating it was a slip of the tongue, Frank replied, "I turned to my own expert, my mother, who reports that in 59 years of marriage, no one ever introduced her as Elsie Fag."

To a Tea Bagger who likened ObamaCare to Nazism in Dartmouth two years ago: "Madam, trying to have a conversation with you would be like trying to argue with a dining room table."

To ignoramuses who'd blame Frank for not being able to understand him, he'd once famously said, "I can read it for you. I cannot understand it for you."

No, Frank did not suffer fools gladly any more than did Anthony Weiner or Alan Grayson. Hopefully in '13, former Congressman Grayson will be occupying his old chair with the stubbornness of an Occupy Wall Street protester in Zuccotti Park. Congressman Frank's quick and incisive wit desperately needs to be succeeded.

As well as his quite impressive record, one that almost rivals that of Ted Kennedy, on issues ranging from financial reform, gay rights and human rights in general and the economy and how it impacted on the working class people in MA-4, the most valuable lesson that Frank has taught us is that it's OK to call a spade a spade or a moron a moron. It's that kind of Bulworth-class straight-talking that used to be part and parcel to American political discourse until Ronald "Thou Shalt Not Speak Ill of a Fellow Republican" Reagan decided it was far better to hide our lights under a bushel if they threatened to torch any dessicated political egos. Barney Frank at low ebb could still make a mockery of John McCain's straight talking.

Frank shattered the longstanding tradition of politicians seriously entertaining college students. Once, on national TV, a right wing Harvard law student dutifully parroted right wing talking points by saying, "You're a public representative, I'm a student..." and Frank immediately shot back, "Which allows you to say stuff you don't back up?"

When Republicans shied away from all but soundstages owned by Rupert Murdoch, Frank was almost a regular fixture in the lion's den of Fox, always girded for battle. To a theatrically "out of control" Bill O'Reilly, an exasperated Frank finally said, "Your stupidity gets in the way of rational discussion."

Nobody was sacred to Frank whether you were a college student at a prestigious Ivy League University or a fellow member of Congress: If you were stupid, ignorant, impertinent or disrespectful, you were fair game. Barney would shoot you, bag you, hollow you out, stuff you and mount you over his mantle before it was shown to all on the 5 o'clock news. And he'd get away with it with comebacks zooming in on the weak point of a fallacious argument, ripostes mercilessly delivered with stunning dispatch and accuracy.

Sadly, Frank will never be emulated as a role model for straight talking that gleefully skewers the willfully ignorant and stupid. Parliamentary protocol, political correctness and an ever-vigilant eye on demographics and a fear on the cellular level of pissing off thin-skinned Republicans means we won't see another Barney Frank again any time soon.

But it ought to be remembered that Frank did it often enough with relative impunity that it should serve as an object lesson to all of us, both private citizens and elected officials alike, of the importance of all of us being Frank.

Open Thread: Assclowns of the Year #4?

Late last summer/early fall, I got a great jump start on my annual year-end feature, amassing loads of pictures, links and about two thirds of my dishonorees for 2011. Then I developed a problem with my laptop and had to set it back to factory standards to get C++ and other programs to work again. This, of course, meant that I lost all my files and programs, including the document where I got a running start on Assclowns of the Year #4 that I stupidly didn't bother to save on disk.

So, considering I'm starting relatively late in assembling this feature, we're probably looking at a New Year's Day debut before this comes out although I'd like to give ya'll a Christmas present. You could help me out immensely by making some suggestions as to who you think should be the top 50 assclowns of the year. Try to think outside the box and avoid obvious targets like Bachmann, Bush, Perry, Obama, etc. I can't look for .jpegs or hyperlinkage if I don't know who I'm writing about.

Saturday, November 26, 2011

The Real Predators

That would be enough money to provide every single American citizen with quality, affordable health care for a decade, with over $400 billion in change. And I didn't pick the number $1,415,000,000,000 out of my ass. That's the high end of the proposed defense spending requested of Congress for FY 2012.

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta made headlines earlier this month with his doom-saying scare tactics, claiming that if the Super Committee decided to cut defense spending, it would be "devastating." The proposed budget for the military is just over $700,000,000,000, up about twenty billion from last year's budget of $685.1 billion. Panetta argued that defense spending cuts would result in the curtailing if not the cancellation of "ground-based intercontinental ballistic missiles, cancellation or delays in plans to build a new strategic bomber, and cuts to missile submarine production."

Yet, considering the Irwin Allen-style disaster economics that have taken place all over the nation from the smallest hamlets to the federal government, it's far likelier that even if the Super Committee agreed to cut the Pentagon's discretionary spending the shortfall would be made up by cuts to the salaries, pensions and health care benefits to our nation's service members (pensions to veterans are expected to reach $54.6 billion, a rich, ripe target right there. Veteran's Affairs accounts for another $70 billion, a total of nearly $125 billion.).

So, if the Pentagon's requisition for 2012 is $705 billion, where does the other $740 billion come from? Well, that's the ancillary budget for national defense that you rarely, if ever, see added to the Pentagon's budget, money that goes to the FBI, NASA, Homeland Security and other agencies within the federal government. When you add everything up, the total defense budget is expected to be as high as $1,415,000,000,000. And that doesn't include the separate budgets that fund the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which comes out to another $80-100 billion a year.

If you look at the annual general breakdown of defense spending, you'll note categories such as Operations and maintenance, Military Personnel, Procurement and so forth. And if you've been keeping track at how much we've been spending annually on war profiteers, you'll note that in virtually every general category (especially procurement), there's always some way to fit private industry into the mix.

For instance, the 15 costliest research and development programs this year add up to $53.3 billion. In all but four cases, there have been cost overruns of up to nearly 58% (The Predator and Reaper unmanned drones that have killed hundreds of not thousands of innocent civilians worldwide.).

Match that against this year's educational spending, which is less than 1/10th that of the Defense Budget. (Just to be fair to the president, his budget proposal for educational spending was $76 billion, which is still just over 10% of what we'll plan on spending for the Pentagon. The federal government also kicks in only 11% of what we spend annually on education.). The interest alone on the national debt, OTOH, is estimated to be almost a quarter of a trillion dollars, or over three times what we'll spend on education.

In January of this year, the Pentagon's Inspector General issued a report (.pdf file) citing "material internal control weaknesses ... that affect the safeguarding of assets, proper use of funds, and impair the prevention and identification of fraud, waste, and abuse." Just the day before that, the GAO issued its own report (.pdf file) explaining why it couldn't offer Congress a comprehensive audit of defense spending for roughly the same reasons.

It's an age-old story that we hear year after year from one Inspector General or another yet Congress keeps tamping hundreds of billions in taxpayer dollars down the throats of private industry while education, health and infrastructure are crumbling around us. And many of those war profiteers offshore their headquarters overseas (like Halliburton and Blackwater, to cite just two of the more notorious examples) while virtually all of them, especially GE, offshore American jobs to be done by foreign labor for pennies on the dollar in order to maximize profits.

Instead, Obama decided to make Jeff Immeldt, GE's CEO, as his jobs czar. If there's a more effective way to twist the knife with sarcastic glee, the President has yet to find it.

So if Occupy Wall Street wants to make a statement to the government, they could start with military spending, contractor corruption and this Congress' and this administration's unwillingness to do anything to stem the tide of corruption and contractor abuse that is literally bankrupting this country at the expense of our and our children's health, education and general welfare.

Friday, November 25, 2011

Thought of the Day/Open Thread

Austin native Dave O'Brien said something on Facebook recently in response to a link that someone had put on their wall. It was to a WaPo editorial entitled, "OWS is Over." Oh, really? I'd asked. And who wrote that? Their right wing ombudsman who'd replaced the late Deborah Howell? Then Dave chimed in with a rant of his own that was more cogent, precise and coldly furious than perhaps anything I could've written. This is what Dave said in full:

I do not find here, nor have I found in Sean Hannity and other detractors of the OWS movement, any thoughtful discussion of the issues that OWS broached. It is easier to point out the fact that persons who live in tents don't shower every day (this hygienic argument, blunt though it is, seems to be the sole arrow in the detractors diminuitive quiver) than it is to address the causes and reasons why it is done in the first place: the financial meltdown of 2008 brought on, in significant measure, by the repeal of Glass-Steagall and the passage of Gramm-Bliley-Leach; the concentration of wealth within fewer and fewer hands conjoined with the purchase of influence at all levels through unlimited campaign contributions, et al. Should we raise the issue of high unemployment which is in part the result of the gutting of American manufacturing productivity and the location of corporations in off shore locations and a work force that has been procured in underdeveloped countries? Or the fact that the mortgage industry has sold its paper to Wall Street speculators, short-ciruiting the process of foreclosure of homes which is occurring at record levels? Or the fact that the banking industry has been bailed out at taxpayer expense with funds which are not loaned back to the persons who are making the bailout possible? Talk about pouring salt on a wound. Small business loans are rare because bankers find more lucrative returns elsewhere. And because of the infrequency of these loans, employment levels have been stagnant if not sinking. (Let's not discuss the high bonuses that are given to these predators while the persons making it possible, one in three of them, are living at the poverty level.) This list, while not exhaustive, might well provide the stimulus to revolutions, in other countries and in other times. Some revolutions, I dare say, were initiated for far less. Why it should be different for us, only time and will can tell. While this article is short, the time required to read it is not time well spent and is palpable evidence of a cynical catering to a populace that is perceived as ignorant, unwilling to delve beneath the surface because of an inability to retain an attentiveness toward any given issue that exceeds that of a two-year old.

Not to be outdone, I then went off on a different tangent, making a distinction that I've never seen made anywhere in the MSM:

Another very important distinction, one you'll never hear in political, financial and RW pundit circles, is that OWS is not a flash mob like the fat, pasty racists of the tea bagger movement. OWS and its various analogs all over the country (the world, even) are crucially distinguished in that they're occupying #1 strategic strongholds of financial and government power and #2, they're holding their ground or occupying new ground day after day, and month after month. The flash mobs of the Tea Party would show up for an hour or two then go home. They suffered no privations, made no sacrifices, experienced no discomfort and, because they were never around at their own events long enough for the punditry or the cops to get sick of them, no persecution. When people like Obama and Biden compare OWS to the Tea Baggers, it elevates the Tea Baggers to a position more exalted than they deserve and immediately undermines what the OWS movement is all about. Anyone comparing OWS to the Tea Baggers is doing so from a criminally stupid and shallow presumption.

Thoughts, comments, complaints, suggestions, lost or stolen items such as $700,000,000,000 in taxpayer funds?

Sorry for the open thread. It's wash day for the missus and me, thereby reducing me to recycling Facebook comments.

Thursday, November 24, 2011

Happy Thanksgiving, Ya'll.

No, it won't be quite like this. It'll be just Mrs. JP, the cat and me and an outside chance of seeing my son Adam and his fiancee later on. It won't be KFC but a pork loin. With my luck, that means, somewhere in America, there's a three-legged pig on a crutch that's looking for me.

So before we clear the table and put up the laptops, let me take this opportunity to tell ya'll what I'm grateful for this Thanksgiving.

I'm grateful for having the few loyal readers I do. You guys prove that quality is always better than quantity. In these brutal times, we have a roof over our heads, a working car on the road and no creditors (yet) knocking on our door.

One of those readers is Mrs. JP, who thought enough of me to walk away from her family to drive 1355 miles alone two and a half years ago in a rickety 15 year-old Chrysler LeBaron on its last legs in the name of love.

I'm grateful that I have strong, healthy sons. It's a shame the mother of two of them didn't live long enough to even begin watching them grow up.

I'm grateful that I didn't succumb to the racist wingnuttery into which my father fell later in life and that I remained independent and strong-minded enough to reject the diktats of all organized religion. I've always been a big believer in Altruism whether I was the giver or recipient. As the poet Percy Shelley once bemoaned to a friend, if only we had a religion founded on charity rather than faith.

I'm grateful for Occupy Wall Street and its countless incarnations and all the hell they're enduring for us to remind us that, yes, the First Amendment does indeed exist and to we who wring our hands at the festering cesspool of corruption this country has become, OWS gives us vibrant, indelible proof that we are not alone.

So as we sit at the dinner table this Thanksgiving, let's offer a vocal or silent thank you to Occupy Wall Street and all those who were swept up in the movement. They, especially those in Occupy Boston and the other colder states, are undergoing tortures and persecution that the rest of us can only imagine. And they'll be right out there again tomorrow decrying corporate greed while the rest of us camp out (without being beaten or pepper-sprayed) outside Wal-Mart, Target or Best Buy.

Wednesday, November 23, 2011

If John Pike Had a Time Machine.

The John Pike Museum of Art

What am I grateful for this Thanksgiving? One of those things is that I live in a country of people who are both culturally informed and have a robust sense of humor. What follows are some of the Photoshopped works of genius by people appalled at John Pike's pepper-spraying of 11 peaceful UC Davis protesters, people who also know their art.